To raise money, Haas felt that they would have to “expand awareness among the general public”—and among librarians — and to do that they would need a set of traveling exhibits about paper and its decline, and a “carefully written and well designed booklet describing the dangers of collection deterioration,” even perhaps a film.12
Haas couldn’t get all this rolling in 1972, but he was a patient man. Jack Sawyer, president of the Mellon Foundation (and former OSS outpost chief in Paris13), liked Haas’s “savvy, shrewdness,14 battle-weariness, and enthusiasm,” and had him installed as head of the Council on Library Resources; by the mid-eighties, Haas, with the horrifying fold-test statistics from Yale and the Library of Congress in his back pocket, was ready for a second big push. In 1986, he wrote and published a yellow booklet, carefully written and moderately well designed, called Brittle Books. (No author appears on the title page, but when I asked Haas who had written it, he said, “I wrote it.”) The booklet summarized several meetings of a certain Committee on Preservation and Access (meetings paid for by the Exxon Education Foundation), whose attendees included the Library of Congress’s own Peter Sparks and William Welsh, Sidney Verba from Harvard, Gay Walker from Yale, Harold Cannon from the NEH, and other interested parties. “Careful analytical work15 undertaken in several leading libraries confirms that books printed on acidic paper begin to deteriorate rapidly fifty years or so after publication,” Haas wrote in the little yellow book. (No analytical work undertaken anywhere confirms that; if anything, acidic paper deteriorates more slowly after fifty years, as available reactants are used up.) A fourth of the volumes in old, large research libraries are “so embrittled that they will soon become useless,” Haas asserts, citing Yale’s survey and the others — brittleness being defined as a paper’s liability to break “after one or two double folds of a page corner.” We must preserve these books and, just as important, provide “wider and more equitable access” to them. The goal of the microfilming effort is to create “a new national library of preserved materials.” Books with intrinsic value (those with “important marginal notes,” for example) ought to be “safeguarded as artifacts”—but for most brittle books “reproduction of content is the only realistic course of action; otherwise, an important segment of the human record will be lost forever.”
There, that’s how to market it. Tell the people that if libraries aren’t given the money to microfilm these books (and to chuck them out when they’re done, but probably best not to stress the chucking-out part too much), people will lose the human record forever. That will get them to listen. “Extraordinary means for capturing the attention of a wide and diverse audience must be found,” Haas wrote. “The Committee is agreed that those who are concerned with preserving our intellectual heritage must speak with one voice if funding and participation are to reach required levels.”
Haas was himself a dogged fund-raiser, and he soon convinced the Exxon Education Foundation to give the Council another grant of $1.2 million; part of the money would found a regional microfilming service-bureau called MAPS (Mid-Atlantic Preservation Services, later Preservation Resources) and part would help pay for a movie. Haas began interviewing filmmakers.
CHAPTER 20. Special Offer
By this time, the microfilm industry — University Microfilms and the other commercial micropublishers and service bureaus, along with the big library labs at the New York Public Library, Yale, Harvard, Michigan, Columbia, Chicago, Berkeley, Stanford, and the Library of Congress — needed a major crisis of paper deterioration in order to divert attention from the many misfortunes besetting their own medium. Library users did not like microfilm, that was clear, and they didn’t like microfiche any better — whether spooled or cut into rectangular sheets, the microphotographic medium was a bust. Even some formerly enthusiastic librarians were becoming more cautious about buying lots of microtext for their collection — the entire micropublishing industry had acquired a faint cheesiness of tone. Allen Veaner, of Microform Review, mentions the sixties influx of federal money for “collection building”1 in college libraries: some libraries bought lots of film or fiche in order to boost their title counts quickly to a level that would allow them to receive one kind of accreditation2 or another. Overheated demand increased the number of micropublishers, and some of them were, writes Veaner,
shady entrepreneurs
3
anxious to cash in on quick profits from micropublication schemes. Unfortunately, with the exception of the largest professional producers, malpractice is often the rule rather than the exception.
One interestingly shady practice was the offer to take old bound journals and newspapers in trade for new microfilm. A library would allow a film salesman to pick up several hundred bound volumes, expecting to get a microfilmed set in return. But the microfilm wouldn’t arrive, and the salesman would begin spinning stories, and the volumes were never seen again — sold to dealers. A man named Charles Venick, who reportedly “perspires a lot,” worked the substitution scam on librarians in California, Iowa, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma in the late sixties and early seventies, until he was finally arrested. One library lost bound volumes “valuing in excess of $10,000.” Murray Martin, who first exposed the practice, wrote that librarians were seeking the benefit of “disposing easily and profitably4 of shelf-eating stock.”
But these deals didn’t always end unhappily. Pamela Darling, head of the preservation office at the New York Public Library in the seventies, wrote in Library Journal that one way to pay for microfilming is “to cooperate with micropublishers5 who plan to market microform copies. In most such cases, the library will receive free film in return for the loan of the original material; reprint fees or royalty payments on sales are sometimes involved.” Since as a rule, according to Darling, once the microfilm is obtained, “the original material may then be disposed of” (except for rare books), this sort of arrangement “can be of great benefit to the library,” if entered into cautiously and carefully.
Financial inducements to get rid of originals by offering free filming continue today. In 1998, Heritage Microfilm, out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa (which did a lot of microfilming for Iowa’s NEH- and state-funded newspaper project6), had this come-on on its website:
SPECIAL OFFER
FREE filming for newspapers with a subscription to your own film. Call 888-870-0484 or email us for a quote on your next filming project.